Structural walls commonly used as efficient structural elements to resist lateral and vertical loads. Diverse performance of bearing wall system in past earthquakes, motivates investigation on the adequacy of current seismic design provision for these walls. This study considers seismic performance of model walls of bearing wall and building frame systems designed as ordinary and special struct...

Many methods have been developed for structural size and configuration optimization in which cross-sectional areas are usually assumed to be continuous. In most practical structural engineering design problems, however, the design variables are discrete. This paper proposes two efficient structural optimization methods based on the harmony search (HS) heuristic algorithm that treat both discret...

Over the past few years, swarm intelligence based optimization techniques such as ant colony optimization and particle swarm optimization have received considerable attention from engineering researchers. These algorithms have been used in the solution of various structural optimization problems where the main goal is to minimize the weight of structures while satisfying all design requirements...

The application of Heuristic Search Methods for the earthquake resistant design of structural frames is discussed. The Tabu Search method was selected for application to structural weight optimization of steel moment frame structures. A computer program was developed that uses Tabu Search for weight minimization of two-dimensional framed structures. Written in the FORTRAN computer language, the...

There is a growing interest in the development of procedures for the design of structures exposed to multiple hazards. The goal is to achieve safer and/or more economical designs than would be the case if the structures were analyzed independently for each hazard and an envelope of the demands induced by each of the hazards were used for member sizing. We describe an optimization approach to mu...

Traditional parallel methods for structural design do not scale well. This paper discusses the application of massively scalable cellular automata (CA) techniques to structural design. There are two sets of CA rules, one used to propagate stresses and strains, and one to perform design analysis. These rules can be applied serially, periodically, or concurrently, and Jacobi or GaussSeidel style ...

We consider a general problem of Structural Design and demonstrate that under mild assumptions it can be posed as a Semidefinite program. The approach in question allows for unified treatment of single-load/multi-load Truss and Shape design with and without obstacles, same as for obstacle-free robust Truss and Shape design. We present three equivalent Semidefinite formulations of the Structural...

Recursive neural networks (RNNs) have been successful for structured prediction in domains such as language and image processing. These techniques imposed structure onto sentences or images for more effective learning. However, in domains such as Web design, structure is explicitly embedded in the Document Object Model, so structured prediction can be done using the natural hierarchy of Web pag...

Conventional structural analysis and design methods typically use a top-down approach to modelling, where there is a global algorithm that controls the solution process. Consequently the real time interaction with the model could become impractical due to its computational intensity. This paper describes an alternative approach to structural analysis, which draws its inspiration in behavioural ...